21. Giovanni Boccaccio had made the pagan deities accessible in the fourteenth century with his book The Genealogies of the Pagan Gods. See Paul Johnson, The Renaissance: A Short History (New York: Random House, 2002), 31.
22. Johnson, The Renaissance, 142. See also Paul Strathern, Death in Florence: The Medici, Savonarola, and the Battle for the Soul of a Renaissance City (New York: Pegasus Books, 2015), 61 (observing that after Botticelli met Ficino and the poet Poliziano, his work “underwent a profound transformation. Instead of religious scenes he began to depict pagan subjects from classical mythology”).
23. Johnson, The Renaissance, 179.
24. Strathern, Death in Florence, 83.
25. See above, 91, 109, 180–81.
26. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 295. See also 312–13 (asserting that “classical antiquity . . . became an ideal of life, [and] ancient speculation and skepticism obtained in many cases a complete mastery over the mind of Italians”).
27. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 319.
28. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 312.
29. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 309. See also 322 (“Nor could they treat of Christianity without paganizing it”).
30. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 323–44.
31. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 138; Nauert, Humanism, 29, 77; Johnson, The Renaissance, 31.
32. Nauert, Humanism, 64–70.
33. Nauert, Humanism, 153–63.
34. Nauert, Humanism, 64.
35. See Strathern, Death in Florence, 100, 106, 134, 147, 149.
36. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 307.
37. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 306.
38. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 310.
39. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 149.
40. Strathern, Death in Florence, 147. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
41. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 291. Cf. Johnson, The Renaissance, 32 (observing that “these masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries waxed and waned in the intensity of their religious passions”).
42. Johnson, The Renaissance, 55.
43. Strathern, Death in Florence, 10. The Renaissance, with its open celebration of paganism mixed with Christian devotion, is sometimes said to have come to an end with the Counter-Reformation’s attempt to rebut the Protestant challenge with a more puritanical Catholicism. And yet the fondness for the pagan past hardly disappeared. It is spectacularly manifest, in the baroque period, in the exquisite Bernini sculptures of Apollo and Daphnae, of the rape of Proserpina, of Aeneas carrying his father and leading his son from Troy. Or in that sculptor’s Oceanus and tritons spouting forth in the Trevi Fountain. Or in Rubens’s numerous representations of scenes from mythology. Or in hundreds of other post-Renaissance paintings and sculptures.
44. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 18.
45. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 20.
46. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 16.
47. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries; Charles Freeman, AD 381: Heretics, Pagans, and the Dawn of the Christian State (New York: Overlook Press, 2008); Jonathan Kirsch, God against the Gods: The History of the War between Monotheism and Polytheism (New York: Penguin, 2004).
48. Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 25–26.
49. The theme is pervasive in Geoffrey R. Stone, Sex and the Constitution (London: Norton, 2017).
50. Norman F. Cantor, Antiquity: From the Birth of Sumerian Civilization to the Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 29.
51. Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 14–15.
52. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 1.
53. Cf. Sarah Ruden, Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (New York: Random House, 2010), xix: “More than anyone else, Paul created the Western individual human being, unconditionally precious to God and therefore entitled to the consideration of other human beings. There is no sign that Paul intended all the social change that gradually (and sometimes traumatically) resulted, the development of the rights and freedoms that characterize the West. . . . But broad social change did follow inevitably from the idea he spread: that God’s love was sublime and infinite, yet immediately knowable to everyone. No other intellect contributed as much to making us who we are.”
54. See Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 60. See generally Michael J. Perry, The Idea of Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11–41 (arguing that human rights are based on a religious foundation).
55. See, e.g., Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
56. See, e.g., Robin Lane Fox, Augustine: Conversions to Confessions (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 21: “Where [the pagan thinker and orator] Libanius represented people ‘happily’ starving, John [Chrysostom] saw the very image of Christ present among the ranks of Antioch’s poor. He was present there, appealing for much-needed charity, as John’s sermons emphasized. . . . At least a fifth of [Augustine’s] sermons characterize the plight of the poor in similarly bleak terms and contain encouragement to give them alms.”
57. Matt. 25:40.
58. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, 144–45, 263.
59. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, 72. See also 71–78.
60. Graeme Smith, A Short History of Secularism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 15.
61. Cf. Ross Koppel, “Public Policy in Pursuit of Private Happiness,” Contemporary Sociology 41 (2012): 49–52.
62. See above, 50–59.
63. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation; The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Norton, 1966).
64. Gay, The Enlightenment, 59.
65. Gay, The Enlightenment, 296.
66. Gay, The Enlightenment, 391.
67. Gay, The Enlightenment, 401.
68. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. H. E. Root (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1757] 1956), 51.
69. Gay, The Enlightenment, 403.
70. Mark Noll, foreword to Damning Words: The Life and Religious Times of H. L. Mencken, by D. G. Hart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), x.
71. For a survey of the anti-Christian theme in a number of important twentieth-century English authors, see Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, vol. 2, Assaults (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 186–283.
72. Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2016), 6.
73. See, e.g., Stone, Sex and the Constitution.
74. See, e.g., Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:498–99.
75. David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Sorkin argues that “the religious Enlightenment . . . may have had more influential adherents and exerted more power in its day than either the moderate or the [antireligious] radical version of the Enlightenment” (21).
76. Gay, The Enlightenment, 122.
77. Cf. Nauert, Humanism, 8 (referring regretfully to “our own era, which has cast aside most of its classical heritage”). See also Anthony Grafton et al., The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), ix (lamenting that “the easy familiarity with the classical tradition that used to be the identifying mark of those who had benefited from a civilized, a
nd civilizing, education has become increasingly rare”).
78. The famous sermon has been repeatedly reprinted. See Jonathan Edwards, Representative Selections, ed. Clarence H. Faust and Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1935), 155–72.
79. Cf. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Random House, [1967] 1990).
80. See William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 2001), 85–87; Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964); Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, [1961] 2010), 57–114.
81. David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 32–33.
82. The criticism is enthusiastically presented in David Niose, Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans (London: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 37–42.
83. See Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 72.
84. Woolf, Rome, 82–93.
CHAPTER 9
Secularism and Paganism
Venerable antagonisms can be rendered obsolete by a powerful new contender. In the early Middle Ages, struggles in the eastern empire between Persians and Byzantines were made moot by the arrival of militant Islam. In the mid-twentieth century, long-standing jealousies among nations of Western Europe came to be overshadowed by the emergence of a menacing Soviet Union. In sports, a legendary rivalry between Bird’s Celtics and Magic’s Lakers was rendered a memory with the ascendancy of Jordan’s Bulls.
So it was supposed to be with the old struggles of the classical world between Christianity and paganism. Christianity is thought to have prevailed, at least officially and politically, in the fourth or fifth or maybe sixth century. As the preceding chapter explained, paganism was not so much eradicated as driven underground—and just barely and occasionally underground; so the old conflict continued to smolder just beneath the political and cultural surface. Then a new force came onto the scene—secularism. And the classical Christian-pagan antagonism was displaced, except as a remote recollection. In its place, we have modern secular society—which, as Charles Taylor observes, is a novel phenomenon unlike “anything else in human history”1—with its own distinctive promises, problems, and challenges.
So goes a familiar story. It is a story that most major thinkers over the past century or so have told and retold, or pretold, in one version or another,2 and a story that has much to recommend it—on the surface, at least. But our actual history has turned out to be more complicated, and more confounding, than the standard story contemplates. In this chapter we will need to consider some of the complications.
More specifically, we will see that the old conflict between paganism and Christianity, or between immanent and transcendent religiosities, is not defunct after all; on the contrary, the opposition is alive and well. Christianity has not followed script and quietly faded away. Not yet, at least. Neither have other forms of transcendent religiosity, such as orthodox Judaism—not to mention Islam. That much is obvious, and widely recognized. What is less obvious is that rather than disappearing, immanent religiosity—or paganism, as we have called it—has (like Proteus) merely altered its forms and manifestations.3
And the old rivalry in the West between paganism and Christianity, or between immanent and transcendent religiosities, shows signs of becoming reinvigorated. As James O’Donnell observes, “The ancient ways of thinking and speaking about religion remain powerful even among those of us who think we share nothing in common with those backward pagans.”4
And to make matters more interesting, or at least more confusing, all of this is happening behind a facade of secularism. A facade is of course not merely an illusion; it is a real and essential part of the building. It gives character to the building. For those who merely pass by, or who pause but don’t bother to enter, it is the building. And yet in reality the facade is only the outward semblance of a much larger edifice, serving to hide from view the inner chambers where people actually live and work and love—and squabble, and sometimes assail each other. Like an old Roman church with a modern facade covering an inner structure that has endured since antiquity, the contemporary period—the one in which we live—is one of a conspicuous secularism covering an ongoing conflict that traces back to the ancient world.
Secularization: A Synopsis in Two Episodes
Standard tellings of the story of secularization tend to emphasize two main developments or episodes that culminated (or at least were supposed to culminate) in two different types or dimensions of secularism. One episode focuses on political and legal developments that have produced a political secularism. The other episode features more philosophical developments—the initially epistemic and by derivation ontological developments often described as “naturalism”—that have produced, at least in some quarters, a more comprehensive or philosophical secularism.5
The political episode recounts how the chaos following the collapse of an overarching Christendom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a series of destructive “wars of religion”: the relatively small-scale Schmalkaldic War of 1546 and 1547 between Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire, the larger and longer French wars of religion (including the legendary and horrific Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres) in the latter decades of the sixteenth century, the even more devastating Thirty Years’ War on the Continent between 1618 and 1648, the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century. Through decades of violence and political disintegration, it gradually became apparent that the project of resettling society and government on the medieval foundation of official Christianity was not a viable one; this realization in turn fostered a consensus that in a religiously pluralistic world, governments could best maintain peace and stability by staying out of the religious realm—by confining themselves to the domain of the “secular.”6
To be sure, the preceding paragraph reflects a good deal of historical consolidation, simplification, and perhaps distortion. In fact, the wars of religion did not immediately lead to the embrace of public secularism; on the contrary, the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War ratified the principle of cuius regio eius religio (the religion of the prince shall be the religion of the realm), thereby initiating the era of the confessional state.7 Indeed, it is difficult to say just when the idea of governmental secularism as the preferred remedy for religious diversity came to be adopted. One might argue that this is a relatively recent and still contestable idea that we (or at least some among us) now cling to and project back onto history, thereby attempting to claim whatever measure of legitimacy or inevitability history can bestow.8
But however meandering the historical path may have been, the idea is widely held today, at least in politically and culturally influential circles. “There is a broad consensus,” Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor approvingly report, “that ‘secularism’ is an essential component of any liberal democracy composed of citizens who adhere to a plurality of conceptions of the world and of the good.”9 This consensus is reflected in current American constitutional law, which purports to require that government act only for “secular purposes” and that government remain detached from and “neutral” with respect to religion.10
The political dimension of secularism does not in itself require the disappearance of religious faith or practice, but merely assigns religion to the private domain (where, at least according to some accounts, it is likely to flourish better anyway than it would if implicated and corrupted in the public sphere).11 By contrast, the other and more philosophical movement is more ambitious, predicting and prescribing a general decline of religion.
The central episode in this development is the emergence of modern science, which teaches us to see the world in different and less religious ways.12 Science operates on the basis of naturalistic premises;
what the universe consists of is the sort of material or natural, empirically observable stuff susceptible to scientific investigation.13 This view is secular because it excludes—at least for the purposes of scientific studies and explanations—nonnatural or religious entities (like spirit, or God) and nonempirical or religious methods of knowing (like revelation). And the fact that science (in contrast to older disciplines like philosophy or theology) has made spectacular progress in understanding and reshaping the world has naturally led to a kind of science envy in other fields, and thus to an aspiration to be like science; this aspiration has sustained a pervasive naturalism—and hence secularism—at least within the academy.14
To be sure, even among self-identifying “naturalists,” debates flourish over what “nature” includes, what “science” is, and whether science should be deemed the exclusive method for knowing the world.15 Moreover, scientists sometimes describe theirs as a “methodological naturalism”: the approach employs naturalistic assumptions for the working purposes of the scientific enterprise but remains agnostic about whether there are realities beyond the natural world. Consequently, following the example of the illustrious Isaac Newton, scientists may be devoutly religious when off duty, so to speak. Even so, the conspicuous successes of science can lead its devotees to suppose that other, nonscientific views of the world are inferior, primitive, not to be trusted. “Science is the measure of all things”: so intones a revealing slogan.16
In this spirit, after perceptive and sympathetic depictions of the classical Greek and Christian worldviews, the philosopher Luc Ferry pronounces that science has rendered these views unavailable. “Neither the ancient model nor the Christian model remain credible for anyone of a critical and informed disposition.”17 Scientists themselves sometimes make similar assertions.18
Though severable, the different aspects of the secularization story are nicely complementary. Political secularism will seem more solid if it is taken not merely as a political strategy but as a reflection of the way reality actually is. And comprehensive or philosophical secularism will be all the more compelling if it can plausibly claim to be not only true but also good, or conducive to good order and political peace. Not surprisingly, therefore, in their real-world manifestations, political and comprehensive secularism often come intertwined.19 Joined, they can seem almost irresistible; hence the near universal predictions among eminent social theorists, noted earlier, that the modern world was destined to become increasingly “secular.”
Pagans and Christians in the City Page 31